The world’s most widely used plagiarism detector cannot detect plagiarism. It never could. What Turnitin and its rivals actually do is match strings of characters — a task closer to spotting duplicate barcodes than to reading — and for twenty-odd years universities have treated the resulting percentage as if it were a moral verdict. It is not. It is a count of coincidences, some damning, most meaningless, and the entire apparatus of academic integrity has been leaning on it like a drunk on a lamppost: for support rather than illumination.
This matters right now because of what has been happening at Cambridge, where allegations of plagiarism concerning Professor Jason Arday’s 2015 doctoral thesis have been circulating — allegations which remain contested, which Arday has not been found by any published process to have committed, and which have, entirely predictably, curdled into a culture-war slanging match within about a fortnight of surfacing. One trench is convinced the case proves everything it already believed about diversity appointments; the opposite trench is equally convinced it proves everything it already believed about who gets scrutinised and why. Neither trench, as far as anyone can tell, has spent much time on the actual text.
Which is a shame, because buried under the noise is a genuinely important shift in how the question “did this text come from that text?” can be answered at all.
Arday’s appointment at Cambridge in 2023 was widely celebrated, and the subsequent allegations about his 2015 thesis were always going to be radioactive. To be scrupulous about it: allegation is all they are. No adjudicated finding of misconduct against him has been published, and questions of what he did, knew or intended remain precisely that — questions, for due process rather than a comment section.
But a recent forensic analysis of the thesis, supplied to this desk, is interesting less for what it alleges about one academic than for how it goes about alleging it. Rather than running the document through a legacy checker and waving a percentage around, the analysis tested 11.09 million sentence pairs — every sentence in the thesis against every sentence in a set of candidate source texts — and compared the results against a control baseline of 34 million sentence pairs drawn from documents known to be independent of one another. The method is the story here. Because whatever eventually happens in the Arday case, this is what the machinery of textual forensics is going to look like from now on, and it is worth understanding before it gets pointed at anyone else. Which it will.
In 2018, a flat-earther spent twenty thousand dollars on a laser ring gyroscope to prove, once and for all, that the planet doesn't spin. The device promptly registered a drift of fifteen degrees per hour — which, for anyone keeping score, is precisely what you'd expect to see on
Settle in →
Reportage Death, these days, has a marketing department. There are bestselling memoirs of heaven, streaming documentaries about surviving it, TED talks with soft lighting, and a steady drip of neuroscience press releases about the dying brain lighting up like the Blackpool illuminations. E
Seán Maigh
Economics There is a particular kind of silence that descends on a room when a politician says the word "productive" with a capital P. You can almost hear the spreadsheets sweating. Somewhere in the Square Mile a man in a quarter-zip puts down his flat white and frowns, because he has read
Reportage In January 2021, the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted Microsoft a patent for building a chatbot out of a specific person's texts, emails and voice messages — including, the filing made clear, a person who happens to be dead. Microsoft's own general manager of AI
Recycling, we're endlessly told, is a virtue. Not in politics. In politics, a recycled pledge is the original failure wheeled back out in a fresh bin bag, and you're a mug if you don't check what's inside before applauding.
The most reliably punctual public service in England is not a train, a bin lorry or a GP's switchboard. It is a man with a horn.
Satire Prometheus stole fire from the gods, handed it to humanity, and spent the rest of eternity chained to a rock while an eagle ate his liver — which regrew overnight, so the bird could start fresh each morning. In February 2023, Microsoft announced that the technology behind its new
Satire The North Sea has swallowed a great deal in its time: Doggerland, the herring fleet, roughly one national energy strategy per parliament. Its latest acquisition is rather pricier per kilo. Somewhere in the waters west of Shetland, a piece of kit destined for Rosebank — the larges